Richard Sheridan

“ Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio.
Jord felt the familiar horror.
When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned. ”

“ Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he'd become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body. ”

“ The scout obligingly swiveled his television optic to show the fused gap in the huge plastic dome through which the natives were hauling incendiary materials to destroy the crop. The motionless bulk of a warrior lay close beside the opening. He had been downed by artillery, while above the force-field the ever present aircraft of the natives circled watchfully. ”

“ Their feet trampled the ancient guns. They smashed at belching muzzles with hammer fists. They had breached the defenses. The natives had fled. In minutes they would be trampling the fleeing enemy.
Then the earth erupted....
Jord had only one leg still functioning when he regained consciousness. One leg and perhaps eight of his optics. His audio was dead and there was something wrong with his respirator. He had to fight to keep down the panic.
A warrior who had been trapped inside his machine once told him what it was like inside a Galbth II when you couldn't move, or help yourself. ”

“ Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty.
There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II.
Time for everything but living.
Gently he kissed the woman's soft neck. "What's your name?" ”

“ Somewhere, the ancient generators had shorted long enough for the raiders to slip through.
"A detachment has already been sent out," the voice continued. "The natives are to be forced back beyond the northern defense perimeter. Intelligence estimates eight hundred of the enemy and thirty field-pieces. The fortress depends on you. You will not fail the fortress."
On that note, the loudspeaker was silent.
"It seems to me," the warrior on Jord's right murmured as they moved towards the opening bulkhead at the far side of the room, "that we almost always fail." ”

“ The last warrior had ceased moving. Later the salvagers would come to collect the precious metals. They drilled Jord's machine open but, luckily, by this time he was dead.
"Which one next?" he asked, clambering awkwardly from the hole in the machine's back. He was a native and, except for certain functional differences in his construction, was little distinguished from other natives. But normalcy is relative. The normalcy of a native may be radically different from that of a fortress dweller. ”

“ In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. ”

“ His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.
"Check motion!"
He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.
The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man. ”

“ Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted. ”